Focus for 2009

The next will be discussed during the first seminar. The seminar
series will not have a concrete focus. Instead, various supervisors propose
their topics for interested students. The supervisors mainly choose topics
that are interesting for themselves, which in particular means that they are
in most cases able to continue supervision also after the seminar
to the end of a potential MSc (or BSc/PhD?) thesis. Such continuation is
however not mandatory.

Students can also propose their own topics, but in this case they have
to find a supervisor who is interested in supervision.

Some topics require previous knowledge of cryptography, but other topics
will be accessible to students who take Crypto I in parallel (although, some
independent work is to be expected in this case).

This course is obligatory for our NordSecMob master students.
Everybody else is also more than welcome.

Signing up for the seminar

Fastest way: use OIS. If you
do not manage - don't blame me, OIS was not programmed for human usage. (You
probably have to email Ülle Holm who will then manually register you.)

Registered students:

Riivo Talviste (supervisor: DB) - 24 April

Katharina Kahrs (supervisor: SL) - 8 May

Kaur Kasak (supervisor: HL) - 15 May

Margus Niitsoo (supervisor: AB) - 22 May

Dan Bogdanov (supervisor: SL) - 29 May

Proposed Topics (sorted by supervisor)

For most of the topics, browse the corresponding section of Helger's Cryptopointers to
find links to papers, surveys etc.

List of the supervisors follows. Click
on the name of the supervisor for topics proposed by the concrete
supervisor.

Dan Bogdanov has a number of topics related to the Sharemind framework for
privacy-preserving computations (http://sharemind.cs.ut.ee).

efficient share computing protocols

Sharemind can compute things pretty quickly. But there might still be ways of
making it faster or adding new protocols for operations. The student will have to
understand how Sharemind protocols are built and will then have to design protocols
for operations not supported by the virtual machine.
> > * extending the Sharemind framework to the malicious model
Currently Sharemind is perfectly secure in the honest-but curious model with three
parties. It would be nice to have a plan for providing security in the malicious
model without losing much of what we already have.

extending the Sharemind framework to more than three parties

Sharemind currently works with three computing nodes. Jan Willemson has proposed a
multiplication protocol for any number of nodes. This protocol should be cleaned up
and proven correct and secure. After that, the whole protocol suit of Sharemind
should be revised to see, if everything can be extended to n parties.

There is an existing protocol prover for Sharemind, but it has some flaws.
Currently, it proves protocol security symbolically, but it should do also do a
semantic analysis. The job of the student will be to pick up the prover and improve
it.

privacy-preserving versions of data mining algorithms using the Sharemind
framework.

There are a number of data mining algorithms written for the Sharemind framework,
but there is room for more. Clustering, correlation analysis, you name it. The
student will have to implement privacy-preserving versions of these algorithms,
taking into account the somewhat different optimization profile of Sharemind.

practical aspects of developing privacy-preserving software

There is a number of issues related to the practical use of Sharemind. What kind of
applications could we build? Are the real-life security guarantees any good? What
are the downsides? How could we make the development of such applications easier?
The topics are distributed on a first-come-first-served basis and some can only
provide work for a single student. If you are interested, contact me for an
up-to-date status.